ICT policy planning in a context of curriculum reform: Disentanglement of ICT policy domains and artifacts

Abstract

Researchers and policy makers around the world are increasingly acknowledging the importance of developing a school-based ICT policy plan to facilitate the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) in education. Despite this interest, not much is known about how schools can develop their local ICT policy capacity and how to establish an ICT policy plan. In order to fill the gap in research on ICT policy planning, a multiple case study analysis with a mixed-method design was carried out with three Flemish primary schools. Primary schools in Flanders are encouraged by the government to develop local ICT policy planning in a context of ICT curriculum reform. Data from multiple sources (e.g. interviews with school leaders and ICT coordinators, focus group interviews with teachers, school policy document analysis, and a teacher questionnaire) were gathered and analyzed. The results indicate that ICT policy planning in schools should be considered as a multifaceted phenomenon grounded in school culture. ICT policy consists of different policy domains: vision development, financial policy, infrastructural policy, continuing professional development policy, and curriculum policy. Each policy domain can be described in terms of policy artifacts (tools, routines, and structures), and differences exist between schools concerning the involvement of teachers in the policy planning process and in the distribution of management tasks. As such, the study illustrates a distributed leadership perspective on ICT school policy planning. The results are of particular importance for school leaders, ICT coordinators and professional development trainers, and illustrates that ICT school policy is as much about developing shared meanings among stakeholders for ICT, and coordinating their relations and interactions in keeping with the school’s culture as it is about content related decisions.

Introduction

One of the central activities of researchers in the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is the quest for conditions that support the integration of ICT into classrooms. In this pursuit, researchers have described supporting conditions situated at both the teacher and school level. A review of the literature reveals that one of the conditions situated at the school level is “having a shared vision and ICT policy plan” (Hew & Brush, 2007). This condition – described here as ICT policy planning – has recently gained attention from both a research perspective (e.g. Fishman & Zhang, 2003) and a policy perspective (e.g. Zhao & Conway, 2001) because of how it might influence teachers’ classroom integration. Far less often discussed is how leadership for ICT creates supportive school-level conditions in general, and nearly never the creation of ICT policy plans in particular (McLeod & Richardson, 2011).

Leadership has been empirically associated with better outcomes for teachers’ professional conditions (Hallinger, 2003), as well as students’ learning (Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008). To establish such linkages this research increasingly investigates leadership practice – what leaders actually do – and specifically how this creates particular school level conditions and influences teachers’ instructional practices. For example, a distributed leadership perspective (Spillane, 2006) builds upon situated cognition and activity theory to examine leadership activities as embedded in context. It emphasizes the examination of leadership practices, particularly the tools, routines, and structures, that are used to accomplish the leadership and/or management practices that organize the work of the leaders and followers. Here we apply such a perspective to ICT policy planning to illustrate ICT policy planning in terms of leadership practices to contribute descriptive detail of how leaders and followers go about this work and organize aspects of their situation to support it. Through case studies we investigate leadership practices for ICT policy planning in three schools where previous research (Vanderlinde & van Braak, 2011) showed teachers have very high and favorable perceptions of the ICT curriculum. While this descriptive research cannot establish that the school level conditions of ICT policy planning leadership practices led to this outcome, it contributes insights in this little understood area that are conceptually aligned with relationships found in leadership studies and upon which further ICT research can build.

This is especially the case in Flanders, the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, were schools are strongly encouraged by the government to develop local ICT policy capacity and to create a school-based ICT policy plan. This encouragement is strongly linked with the implementation of a compulsory ICT curriculum for primary education (Vandenbroucke, 2007). Besides, school-based management literature (e.g. Fullan & Watson, 2000) teaches us that school-based management initiatives have the greatest chance of being successful when focused on curriculum reform. The Flemish curriculum is structured in terms of ICT attainment targets, defined as minimum objectives regarding the ICT knowledge, skills and attitudes viewed by the government as necessary for and attainable by all students in compulsory education. The ICT attainment targets do not focus on technical skills, but emphasize the integrated use of ICT within the teaching and learning process. Since 2007, primary schools in Flanders have a clear understanding of what the government expects when it comes to ICT integration, and they must all put the ICT curriculum into practice (Vanderlinde, van Braak, & Hermans, 2009). Given the decentralized educational policy nature of Flanders, schools are given strong autonomy and are responsible for implementing and translating the ICT curriculum into concrete teaching and learning activities. Within this context, ICT policy planning is encouraged, and seen as a lever that facilitates both the process of ICT integration and the realization of the Flemish ICT curriculum (Vanderlinde et al., 2009).

Within the context of the Flemish ICT curriculum reform, this study explores how primary schools develop local ICT policy capacity through a lens focused on leadership practices.